


yours sincerely

by orphan_account



Series: Fort Valla [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Japanese-American Character, Multi, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 02:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7295011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aunt Mikoto dies. Leo deals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yours sincerely

**Author's Note:**

> this takes place 4-5 years before the other fic in this series! leokumi are seniors in high school, corrin is a freshman at college, and the younger sisters are in intermediate school (by which i mean "couldn't decide between high and middle, stuck 'em vaguely in between").

Aunt Mikoto died. Leo finds out when, after his walk to the intermediate school is unexpectedly solitary, he sees Elise sitting on the steps with her knees to her chest, alone and quiet and staring at nothing. Sakura, like Takumi, is missing; and when Leo calls Elise by name, she looks up startled, then leaps at him, crying.

Leo was cursing Takumi out the entire trek here. Now his throat clogs with panic.

"What happened?"

She extracts her face from his chest long enough to blubber, "Is—Is it true?"

"Elise. What's true?"

She pulls herself away fully to fumble with her phone and hand Leo texts of which Takumi didn't send him twins: that Sakura went home early; that she is sorry; that their mother got hit by a car and that she died an hour ago in the ICU, that _Elise I don't know what to do_.

His sister is crying and nagging at him to tell her this isn't real because how does that just happen, she saw Aunt Mikoto this morning and she's the nicest lady Elise has ever met. Leo's heart is line and stone.

"Shit," he mutters, and scrolls through Elise's contacts, tapping duly on Camilla for a ride home.

* * *

Leo last spoke to his own mother in middle school, when she appeared outside the building at dismissal and offered to take him for ice cream and he threatened to call the police. She always showed up after he did something noteworthy; then he'd appeared in the newspaper for a science fair project, and she presumably saw his picture and remembered she had a son.

"What do you want?" he asked, and noted forlornly how much he looked like her, all slender shoulders and long lashes and a small mouth which on her was attractive but just made him look girly.

"To see you, baby," was her response, uncomfortable enough that he was immediately glad Elise had never truly met her, could never learn a shred of her shrewdness. His mother smiled in a way that looked predatory, the tips of her mouth stretching into her cheeks, her grisly, salon-whitened teeth messing up her lipstick, when she asked him about his father: "How's Gary?"

Leo could have gagged, but clutching his books tight to his chest he said, "Fine." And for good measure, "He never mentions you."

She laughed like she knew he was lying and he wondered suddenly if she, like Aunt Mikoto seemed to be with Takumi, was equipped with some way of knowing, a terrifying, motherly biology that could tear through the walls of his skull and read the memories imprisoned there—his father sneering at him in disgust; Xander agreeing that it _is_ all Leo's fault, this rotten broken family; the dark of the basement and its creaky staircase. He pulled at his sleeves, holding them in place with his fingers. Which was thought out poorly. As if he'd highlighted the bruise with a marker, she put a hand on his right arm.

"I have to go," he said, and didn't move. She pressed down on his forearm.

That's when she came as if he'd signaled for her—Takumi's mother, his Aunt Mikoto. Leo didn't recognize his own name through her accent until Corrin honked from the passenger seat that was usually Takumi's, stuck her head out of the window, and called for him, too.

"Leo," Aunt Mikoto was frowning, "aren't you coming?"

He nodded and she wrenched his arm away, piled him next to Sakura in the Sumeragis' sedan, and drove back to the elementary school to pick up Elise. The five of them—Takumi, Sakura, Leo, Corrin, and Elise—squished into her car to and from school for the next week; a month later, Aunt Mikoto bought a van.

* * *

Takumi has stopped talking to him. Actually he's stopped talking at all. The day of, Leo went next door with Camilla and Elise and their lasagna two hours later than they should've, and Takumi wasn't even home; between phone calls, Hinoka said that he'd gone with Ryoma to work out some arrangements. All night, Leo stared intermittently between family pictures and his phone, counting sobs and heartbeats. Camilla held Sakura long and tight while Elise made kettle after kettle of untouched tea. Hinoka kept saying English words like "funeral" and "body" in the middle of conversations otherwise in Japanese. Xander's car pulled in the driveway and then pulled out toward the hospital. Corrin didn't text back.

He wanted to go home.

Finally Takumi came back and Ryoma and Xander came in behind him and weirdly-unexpectedly Aunt Mikoto didn't follow, and Takumi didn't look at anyone or say anything, just climbed up the stairs and slammed his door shut and didn't come down again, so Leo went up and knocked and called his name to no acknowledgement, and he didn't know what to do then and he hated not knowing and his phone was dead and he couldn't even look up why the hell you say a phone battery dies when it can come back to life again, so he left and took Camilla's keys and crossed the yard to 1414, where he sprinted to his own room in the renewedly terrifying darkness and locked the door, dropped himself face-down onto his pillow, and breathed.

It's been two days.

It's been the weekend, so there's no school and he figures Takumi wouldn't have come anyway, but, still, Leo hasn't seen him. And he isn't so clingy to his best friend that he needs to see or hear from him and demand to know he's okay, but the radio silence is killing him—shit—and he doesn't know what to do with himself, with his she-was-more-than-a-neighbor-she-was-a-good-friend being here one day and gone the next, with her flowers wilting in both their gardens for lack of water and attention, with her one son not saying a word and the other driving this way and that, organizing a funeral and, he hears, a cremation.

Takumi isn't reading his texts, and Leo hasn't gone back to 1416. Cars keep pulling into the driveway and staying the night.

Corrin has read receipts off. Camilla is cooking for 8 again.

Xander says that the wake is tomorrow, that Ryoma was worried it's being done late. Yesterday Hinoka broke down.

Elise hasn't left Sakura's side. She's a good friend.

Leo isn't.

He's been losing Takumi all year.

* * *

Last summer they threw Corrin's going away party in 1416's basement, after Ryoma and Camilla argued over the venue for days. The Sumeragis' place, Ryoma rightfully argued, could contain it longer as a surprise; Camilla finally relented upon the reminder that the basement also had a kitchen in which to hide the snacks. Sakura and Elise were #TeamDecorations; Xander held the office of Distract Corrin From All Party Plans, which he did mostly by driving the Sumeragis' van to IKEA. Takumi and Leo, it was decided in the GroupMe, were in charge of inviting Corrin's friends. The bulk of this occupation took place in Fort Valla, where, if he sat in a particular corner, Leo could nab the Wi-Fi from Takumi's room and design the evite. Meanwhile Takumi scrolled through Facebook, reading out names for potential guests.

"Jake Butler, Felicia and Flora, oh, Keat Wolfe?"

Leo looked up. "You're kidding me. That's seriously his name?"

"Keaton Wolfe," Takumi confirmed, showing Leo his phone screen. Keat's header, like the folders Leo remembers from middle school, was a wolf howling at the moon. "Yes or no?"

"They're friends," said Leo with a grimace, and that was enough.

"Okay," said Takumi then, "what about Silas?"

Leo pulled down his laptop screen. "What about Silas?"

Takumi said, "They're kind of friends?"

"Yeah," said Leo, pushing up his glasses, "but they broke up."

"It's not like they don't get along."

"He still _likes_ her," Leo pressed, because it seemed damning—how could they invite Corrin's ex to her going away party when he was still in love and she was literally moving on? What if he cried or showed up drunk or tried to propose or something? It would be mortifying. For Corrin.

Takumi noted, "Your family is _really_ overprotective, you know that?"

Leo felt like he could see, hovering at the forefront of his brain, three separate dialogue options and their predicted trees. Biting his tongue he ran through them with a sudden deliberateness, fixated on the one he'd normally deem least likely.

"Takumi," he said, folding his laptop shut like it might hear him. "I'm gonna tell her next week."

Takumi frowned, his brow squishing into his eyes. "Tell who what?"

"Corrin," said Leo. "That I love her."

" _What_?"

"What?"

"It's just that, uh," Takumi's face cycled through expressions, struggling among confused and shocked and deliberation. "That came out sounding kinda _wrong_ for, like, your sister."

"Foster sister," Leo corrected.

"Right, foster sis—Wait Leo are you _serious_?"

"Why would I be joking?"

" _Dude_ ," said Takumi, and didn't say the rest, a habit of his family's—cutting off a thought or sentence, hoping the silence would fill in the space. When it failed so to do, Takumi continued, "Dude, what the hell. How long has this been a thing?"

Leo didn't answer. Honestly, he didn't remember.

"Oh my god," said Takumi, his face pink, "you've been hiding this for years, haven't you?"

"Sorry," said Leo. Takumi's revulsion was merited; they hadn't shared every personal detail in the past ten years, but Takumi's crush on Subaki, his peer leader in 9th grade, had been a pretty big deal. There'd been crying involved; confessions, conversations, self-discovery.

The last week of vacation, involuntary or not, Takumi wouldn't stop making faces at Corrin's feet. And at the party to which Silas showed up smiling and sober, Leo brooded in Fort Valla until Corrin came to find him, and then he confessed.

* * *

Right now Aunt Mikoto is burning. Earlier he saw the body and heard a priest give her a new name, and unable to cling to Sakura, Elise clung to him. She was in a black dress and looked less like their mother than he did in his suit, and Leo remembered suddenly that Xander loves Elise more than he loves him, which is a kind of comfort.

He's changed into a T-shirt and pants and is scribbling names in a notebook that belongs to Calc BC, eyes flashing periodically out the window, like he's expecting someone to come out and work at the garden or pull out rackets. Camilla left for work. Xander and Elise are on the piano, and he thinks Arthur was watching them from the rug.

Corrin calls him.

"Hello?"

"Hey," she says, and leaves off _little bro_. He's always felt older and younger than her at the same time, anyway.

"Hi," he says.

"I just got out of class. How was the funeral?"

"It was," says Leo. Just was. "They're cremating her."

"Whoa," Corrin says, and he can picture her saucer eyes and parted mouth, walking around the campus he visited in fall, struggling with her bag. "Is that what they did to their dad, too?"

"I don't remember, probably."

"She would like that, though."

"Yeah."

"Oh, hey!" She covers the phone, yells out to someone far away. "Listen, Leo, I have to study for finals, catch you later?"

"Yeah," he says. "Later."

She hangs up.

That was the call he'd anticipated. The excuse Aunt Mikoto gave him.

He feels stupid. And like shit.

He texts, _Takumi won't talk to me. /_ _I mean, even before all this. /_ _He thinks I'm selfish and weird._

 _you are weird,_ she says. _that's what i love about you._

He stares at his notebook.

_Corrin. Takumi. Corrin._

* * *

Before Leo could speak his mother dropped him off at 1414 and said it was for a playdate with his half-brother. Xander's mother Katerina was tall and frightening and yelled a lot, and, when Leo's mother still hadn't shown to pick him up three days later, Katerina packed her bags and left. When Leo's mom returned, she gave her son a hug and a kiss and stayed for too long.

That's how Elise was born. Camilla, with no Katerina to hate her, was pulled in right after.

Then one day one of Dad's friends kicked Leo's mother out but kept Leo and Elise. Months later they had new neighbors that Dad called chinks and Elise called her second family; one of the boys was Leo's age and dared to step in his backyard, so Leo told him to fuck off and the boy told him it was a free country, right, so he was free to step across an undrawn border and Leo was free to go inside and whine to his mommy before his whiteass skin got burnt.

"That makes no sense," Leo'd said, because the boy was fair-skinned, too, but he decided to be offended anyway, and so it went on until, without realizing it, they'd become friends.

His neighbors were growing a garden and Leo decided he wanted one, too, so whenever Takumi's mother came out, he'd run out and go to work, sneaking glances. One day she laughed and asked if she could cross the perimeter to help him. He could call her Aunt Mikoto. And what did he think of a little tree house in that oak that straddled their properties?

He thought he'd like that a lot. So it was built and it was theirs.

When she appeared years later, Corrin nodded approvingly and named the treehouse Fort Valla. And, as with everything Corrin said, Leo immediately agreed.

He wouldn't realize until the summer of their last year in high school, when in that same treehouse Leo tardily admitted he loved its appraiser, that Takumi never really cared for the name.

* * *

Leo writes it as a note, writes it again, balls a copy up, and throws it from Fort Valla into Takumi's window.

It says, among other things, that he is sorry for being a shit friend.

Takumi pokes his head out of the window, his long hair in knots and face gray and eyes somewhere between pissed and weary.

"Holy shit," he says, "this really isn't about you."

And he slams the window shut.


End file.
